Why African American Artists Can’t Use Instagram

As an artist who takes a lot of photographs, I’ve discovered a bug in Instagram and FourSquare. It’s a little known flaw, but probably really only affects African Americans because of racial profiling.What’s this you say? What does racial profiling have to do with Instagram and FourSquare. Well for that fact both of these apps deal with picture taking usually through the ubiquitous cell phone camera. Did you know as I found out today that you cannot take pictures on private property without advance permission from the media department????? Hey, the Sheetz, McDonalds, your childs school, Walmart, Old Navy and the local Hospital helicopter landing pad as I found out today are all off limits! So you wonder how then do all those pictures get up to Instagram and FourSquare?Well let’s go over the occurence for this artist on the grounds of Vidant Medical Hospital in Greenville, NC. I go there to pick up a Rx for my HPB and figure to check into Foursquare, but there’s no picture in FourSquare of the medical building I just came out of. So I whip out my trusty Samsung GalaxyII (can’t afford the new III or IV) and snap and upload to Foursquare.I then figure, “hey wouldn’t it be kool to take a shot of the helicopter landing pad and crew repairing lifesaving helicopters?” Ehhhh that’s illegal too. Or what probably is the real issue is, one of the workers is watching me take pictures and probably says to himself, “Ahhh a Black Man with Dreads taking pictures, now that’s suspicious. Black people don’t use cameras for FourSquare or Instagram, he’s probably a terrorist!” So he goes back inside and calls hospital police. Smart instead of watching the real terrorists like in Boston from Chechnya, Pakistan or Iraq, we let them do all the weird crap and watch the Black People”.So now two patrol cars encircle me, and being a person from the 60’s it doesn’t surprise me at all when a burly Black Officer asks, “Hey do you have any ID?” Wait now so you think I’m stupid enough to drive a car and carry no ID while taking pictures Duuhhhh. I answer surely, and hand over my Drivers license and State security officer ID. He runs it through wherever cops run checks through nowadays and ask what am I doing. So I explain I’m an artists taking pictures.Uhh Ohhh how do we call that in? It’s a 10-369 “taking pictures while being an African American Artist”. Wow just kidding but these guys acted like they never saw a Black Artist, that claimed such. The White officer just hung his head, I didn’t know if he wanted to bust out laughing or maybe bust me one upside the head. So after my license checked out I was let go with a warning not to take pictures on Private Property again and it let me know that someone is watching the sensitive areas in our country, but watching the wrong people, because my White artist counterpart buddies have gobs of pictures on Foursquare and Instagram, but no stories like mine!Hey what do you think about this? Let this artist know in the comment area below.